Treasure Island

Ruiz's playful and clever treatment of the text returns to a recurring theme in his work: the simulation parable of Borges and Baudrillard of the map and the territory. The fascinating script and cinematography is let down significantly by a terrible dubbing job, which is typical of Ruiz's English language productions.

This had an infamously fraught and troubled production history, and it does sort of show (as Ruiz himself would readily admit), yet in my eyes it still ranks as one of his major achievements. Stevenson's mythos was prevalent throughout Ruiz's entire body of work, and this effort sort of perfectly ties together his usual mid-'80s style while hinting at the bigger budget films he would go on to make in the '90s and '00s. It somehow manages to be both one of his strangest and most accessible films.